Tag: writing

Inundation

On By C. L. BlackeIn Randomness, UncategorizedLeave a comment

For most Westerners, January 1 marks the beginning of a new year when people take stock of their lives and resolve to change for the better. If I were Chinese, I would be celebrating New Year on the second new moon after the winter solstice, or during the inundation of the Nile River if I were living in ancient Egypt.

I guess I’m not any of these people because I celebrate my new year in October. Columbus Day weekend, specifically. It is the anniversary of my freedom, of a time when I ventured out completely alone like The Fool, stepping over the precipice into Life and starting over. I had hopes of doing great things.

It is now three years later and time to once again reevaluate my life and my accomplishments.  So where are they? I failed to lose 10 pounds, I failed to finish any novel/screenplay, failed to get a new a job, failed to save money for a Christmas or retirement fund (well, actually I did then had to dip into it for an emergency), and failed to find true love.

So much for resolutions.

Of course that’s not to say I didn’t accomplish anything this year–just not the things I had planned on.  In fact, I did some pretty amazing things that just came out of nowhere. I started taking belly dance lessons and eight weeks later I joined a dance troupe for public performance. I raised over $3700 and walked 60 miles in a heat wave to help end breast cancer. I earned my preliminary teaching license and recertified as a Group Fitness Instructor. And I got accepted into an initial teaching license for secondary education program at the local university.

But how does one balance these accomplishments with the failure of the ones that mean the most to me? Did somewhere along the subconscious road I figure that losing ten pounds or finishing a novel was too hard and so spent my time and energy on doing things I knew I could achieve?

While I try to decipher that mystery, I will comfort myself with the knowledge that the changing of the seasons, the phases of the moon, and the flow of the Nile River is inevitable.  As is the opportunity for doing great things in another New Year.

Agatha Christie

On By C. L. BlackeIn Craft WorkLeave a comment

My mom happened to be watching a documentary on Agatha Christie when I was at her house doing laundry today. I only caught the last 20 minutes of it or so, but it seemed to be centered on her summer retreat called Gardensomethingorother, which is going to be or has been opened to the public for the first time.  She spent all of her summers there where she no longer had to be Dame Agatha Christie but instead had been Mrs. M–a devoted wife, mother, and grandmother.  She didn’t write in the months she spent there; she swam, went boating, played tennis, and lazily watched the river traffic pass by.

None of this is entirely important or to the point.

I had the distinct impression, while shoving a load in the washing machine, that even though Agatha despised the fame and social aspect of the literati life (because she was shy not because she was a snob), she enjoyed what she was doing when she was doing it. I had imagined she’d been totally invested in all her stories–with the plots, the characters, the process.  They were her life and her family and she wouldn’t have dared abandon them until everything had been worked out to the end.

I want to feel that way again.

Failure

On By C. L. BlackeIn Craft WorkLeave a comment

Script Frenzy is out.  Day 26 and I have four pages.  (Does one of them count when it’s the title page?)

It’s not procrastination this time (I worked on it plenty and have brightly colored post-it notes and index ccards pinned to a bulletin board to prove it); I blame poor planning and a late arrival.  Maybe some people can do it all in 30 days, but I think to effectively complete a screenplay or a novel in 30 days, you must have it mapped out ahead of time.  And I don’t just mean the character work, the motivations, the external goal, internal need, blah blah blah.  The story needs to be fully realized in your head or better yet on paper unless you want to spend a month writing incoherent scenes that have nothing to do with each other by page 100.  I don’t want to spend the whole challenge frustrated by tyring to find my story.  I want to write it.

The thing that stumped me the most was the beginning.  Well, what else could it have been if I only wrote three pages?  My Theatre Arts professor, who directed all the program’s plays, told me that often the opening scene didn’t come to him until sometime deep within rehearsals.  Granted, he already had the words in front of him, but I understand what he meant.

En Medias Res is always a tried and true method.  I think I was trying to focus more on the visual aspects of how the story would look onscreen rather than concentrate on the story itself.  Not to mention, I had no motivation for the sorceress Ilaria to abduct the young male gypsy (who coincidentally looked like a young Johnny Depp) in the opening.  Whatever I thought was her motivation had turned out not to be the case, and the opening scenes I had written were just blocking me from moving forward.  They were bridgeless.

And even though I’m a complete failure at Script Frenzy 2011, I managed to use the time to concoct a story and a plan for writing it where ideas can flow unheeded by deep chasms of crap.